Future plans and price change

Now that the ZotPad 1.1 is ready, it is time to reveal some future plans. Version 1.2 will bring read and write access to notes and will be released this fall. This is an incremental update that contains much less new features and fixes than the 1.1 version, which also means that the release will not take as long to develop than the 1.1 release did.

The version 1.3 is much more interesting. Reading and annotating PDF files is by far the most common use of iPad with Zotero. Currently ZotPad includes only an Apple provided QuickLook viewer that contains only basic support for reading PDF files. Because of this, many users are using third party applications such as GoodReader, iAnnotate, and Adobe Reader. The use of two different applications is not an optimal solution and because of this, version 1.3 of ZotPad will include a new built-in PDF viewer that will be built on top of iAnnotate technology. Because the iAnnotate library is relatively expensive, the price of ZotPad was increased to cover the costs.

Understandably, not everyone likes the price increase and some might even prefer using a third party application for reading and annotating instead of doing this directly in ZotPad. You should not be worried, because the 1.3 release and all releases after that will come in two different versions: ZotPad and ZotPad Free. The free version will be priced at zero and will contain all the features of the normal version that do not require the iAnnotate technology.